Thursday, May 19, 2016

I kind of miss this cozy space. I remember sitting on the floor of my high school bedroom and sliding the patio door open all the way, the screen, too, so that I sat half-inside, half-outside. I remember stacking two memory boxes to fashion a desk and logging into Blogger, excited to add to this creaky site. I scoured Tumblr and Flickr for photos and paired them with quotes from my latest reads, and though at times I thought it was clever, more often I thought it was rather unoriginal, but I loved it anyway -- this post-reading ritual, this tidy exercise of closure -- so that insecurity, always ready with its insulting questions and comments, was readily silenced.

It has been five years since, and about two years since I moved from Blogger to Bookswept.com. Regardless of platform, so much of the blogging landscape has changed. I suspect that its long form expression is no longer tolerated; we prefer brevity, captions not paragraphs, and we prefer a continuous stream of new, skimming not reading. I kind of miss the old, messy intimacy of blogging; less likes, hearts, followers and hashtags, but also less rigid and urgent because of it.

We now shape our content to cater to platforms designed and controlled by private corporations, i.e. Instagram, Twitter, etc. If we are to create, we seem to prefer to follow rules and guidelines, to select from finite options, and to display our content in the same way as everyone else.

Of course, there is much to appreciate. I love how effortless it now feels to create, sometimes just a few taps. I love that my community expands to include people and places that are absent from my normal day-to-day, offering a peek into lifestyles, priorities and aesthetics that are not my own.

I offer no conclusion, except that I will keep writing, and reading, so I hope you will keep writing, too.